People on my mother’s side left the British Isles and put down roots in southern Tennessee, hard against the Alabama line. A faction would later settle on the sandy ground of Missouri’s Bootheel.

I come from a long line of slow talkers.

My wife’s kin, of German heritage, like to say I come from a line of slow thinkers, but that’s another story.

Movies used to portray people with drawls as either uniformly stupid or country-smart lawyers.

To me, those movies sounded like family reunions. In my family, there were no attorneys.

The modest pace of speaking bothers me little. Weak as I am with small talk, the leisure in my locution proves a time filler of some social necessity.

By the time I finish a thought, the listener has forgotten the thought I started. Good for me.

Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff” has a passage about a generation of airline pilots whose announcements to passengers had a honey-dripping feel. They had a practiced sound, a calmness that commercial fliers came to expect.

Over the intercom, this is the voice “that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because ‘it might get a little choppy.’”

Mr. Wolfe traced the origins of that unhurried and reassuring tone to the great test pilot Chuck Yeager. A generation of flyboys adopted it because nothing sounded cooler coming from the cockpit.

Maybe the lineage of this leads to Chesley Sullenberger. He piloted US Airways Flight 1549 in January, a trip that started at a New York City airport and ended six minutes later in a New York City river.

The jetliner sucked birds through its engines, shutting them down. Capt. Sullenberger couldn’t make it to a runway. The voice heard by air traffic controllers over the radio indicated no inflection of distress.

He said, “We’re gonna be in the Hudson.”

Just like that. No power, 155 people on board, a frigid river below. Sully’s measured instruction: Here’s where to pick us up.

Everybody survived.

The pilot now peddles a book, and I heard him on a Kansas City radio show the other day. For some reason, I felt safer driving my car when he was speaking.

Had my hair been on fire, he could have said, “Well, that’s nothing some Aquafina can’t take care of,” and my heart rate wouldn’t have risen.

Americans feel a bit jittery these days.

The more wars we fight, the more terrorists there seem to be.

Friends don’t look like friends but H1N1 carriers. (Are you my pal or a Petri dish?)

Keeping a job proves trickier than safeguarding a lighted candle in a cyclone.

We settle for leaders who shine brightest when spinning falsehoods into reasonable statements. Spin well and long, and a bridge gets named in your honor.

The nation doesn’t get many leaders who say, “There’s some water down there, so I’m sure we’ll be OK,” and make you believe it.

Instead, we hear “health care reform is great,” countered by “health care reform is terrible,” and the tune sounds all too familiar.

Sully, please just tell us what to do. And say it at your own speed.

Ken Newton’s column runs on Sunday and Tuesday.